It was in August 1979, while searching for arrowheads inside Idaho’s Civil Defense Caves – ancient lava tubes running from Yellowstone National Park, partly repurposed as a cavernous fallout shelter during the Cold War – that one unfortunate family found it: a human torso in a hessian sack, buried 20cm beneath the sediment. The identity of the deceased – whose other body parts were missing – and...
Navigation doesn’t always come naturally, and it’s going to get harder once we make it to other worlds. Luckily, Ordnance Survey are on the case, and have just released their first map of the surface of Mars. The map, which has been published on Flickr, was created using open data from Nasa, and is the first time the Ordnance Survey have produced a cartographic chart of another planet...
People who feel sick when they smell and overpowering perfume may not necessarily be allergic, but may have a condition that results in the inability to get used to smells. Usually your smell perceptions diminish rapidly, for example when you walk into someone else’s house or get into a new car you notice a different smell immediately. After a while, most people stop noticing them. However...
In 1997, the Bloop was heard on hydrophones across the Pacific. It was a loud, ultra-low frequency sound that was heard at listening stations underwater over 5,000km apart, and one of many mysterious noises picked up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several articles in the years that followed popularised one suggestion that the Bloop might have been the sound of an...
A Canadian visual artist called Sarah Hatton has taken thousands of dead honeybees and arranged them onto canvasses in mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci spiral found in sunflowers. Hatton — who is also a beekeeper — decided to use bees in her work to spread awareness of bee colony collapse disorder to a broad audience in a conceptual way. “Life often finds its way into...
Velvet worms are adorable caterpillar-y looking things, silently plodding along on stumpy legs in tropical forests around the world. A recently discovered species was so cute, it got a name straight out of Studio Ghibli: <a target=”_blank”>Eoperipatus totoros. The species name is an homage to the CatBus in the film .:My Neighbour Totoro “the species is named after the main...
In 1994, the Walt Disney Company launched Disney Cruise Line, a new franchise flagship. It did all the right things, starting with hiring an experienced team from the top cruise lines and commissioning the construction of its own fleet. But Disney’s focus on creating next level experiences meant that this could be no ordinary cruise operation. In the middle of the first design concept...
The Georgian philosopher Zura Shiolashvili has fashioned for us a magnificent and beautiful book, The Prelude of Divine Wisdom in the Art of Aphorism. It’s a powerful tour de force in the realm of religious philosophy and spiritual aesthetics, as the author brilliantly dismantles and overturns Friedrich Nietzsche’s often-celebrated arguments against Christianity — and especially against the...
A group of amateur astronomers has helped discover a new feature of the Northern Lights using a photograph posted on Facebook. When the mysterious purple streak was first discovered in British Columbia, it appeared to be the first of its kind and, as the Boaty McBoatface debacle proved, when you leave naming something to the public, they do so in style. In this instance, the newly-discovered...
A strangely-shaped black hole could cause Einstein’s theory of relatively to completely “break down”, according to new computer simulations. The simulation shows a thin, ring-shaped black hole — fat ‘bulges’ connected by strings that eventually grow so thin that they become a series of miniature black holes. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and...